Representation for Facebook Groups

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

From your speeches, you seem like a great guy who is keen to make Facebook a positive force in the world.

This letter sets out an idea for your team.

As you know, Facebook Groups is the most popular Facebook product outside the original newsfeed. With a billion users, it is more popular than Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter combined.

Here in Melbourne, Members of Parliament estimate that 80% of the volunteer groups in their communities use Facebook Groups for communication, including residents’ associations, migrant clubs and a wide variety of informal groupings, from parents’ groups to cycling enthusiasts.

However, there is one task that remains difficult for a volunteer group to do through Groups or any other platform: electing representatives or leaders.

An election tool for Facebook Groups would be very helpful in this regard.

Facebook accounts are relatively easy to verify, compared to other online systems. And getting a few members who aren’t on Facebook to join for a vote would be easier for many groups than using manual ballots or moving all their members to a specialised voting platform.

I’m sure union organisers and other political activists have made the case for an election tool to you before. They would have talked about supporting basic democratic practice around the world.

In response, your software engineers probably said “It’s scope creep”.

I appreciate that from a software development perspective, an election tool seems outside of Facebook’s core functionality — like something that would be more appropriately developed through the Facebook API.

But in terms of helping people organise their own communities, a third-party tool would be too limited. Too few people would know about it. And it would have no way of recognising the elected positions more broadly across Facebook.

Anyone who has held an organising role will understand the importance of linking group representation and recognition.

Imagine the following typical scenario.

1. A residents’ group debates a controversial proposal to build a new basketball centre. It becomes clear that someone should raise their concerns with the regional basketball association.
2. The basketball association is also divided over the proposal. One player says she might nominate against the association president.
3. The association president appears in the local newspaper promising further consultation and a compromise design.

For much of the 20th century, these sort of processes were familiar to almost everyone as part of their community lives. But as Robert Putnam argued in Bowling Alone, the spread of the car and the television pushed people back into their homes, and shifted their attention from an active engagement in local politics to a more passive consumption of state and national politics.

For the first time in a long time, Facebook Groups is a technological platform that has partially reversed this trend. It has actually increased people’s interest in community matters.

I talked to a Member of Parliament recently who said, “Groups on Facebook are definitely changing things. I’ve had councillors complain to me about them. They don’t worry me. But they are definitely paddling pools for people who want to build a profile for council campaigns. And they’ve made for more work for everyone”.

There is a widespread recognition in political circles that having large numbers of community groups on Facebook, as well as increasingly localised targeting options for Facebook ads and posts, is a potent combination. But Groups is still very limited from an organising perspective. It is great for facilitating discussion. But it does not support the emergence of those traditional group leaders who would reconcile their members’ views and represent them externally. If those leaders exist offline, there is no way of recognising them in the system. If they don’t exist, it is hard for a Facebook Group to develop them.

It would be great if a group could elect representatives. It would be great if those representatives could be recognised beyond the group — a little recognition goes a long way for volunteer roles. It would be great if someone who wanted to post on behalf of their group could do so as ‘Kate Smith, Secretary, Collingwood Autism Support Group’, instead of having to use their personal profile, which obscures their role, or an anonymous ‘Collingwood Autism Support Group Page’ page, which obscures their name. It would be great if comments made on behalf of a group could be linked to that group. As a basic thing, it would be great if closed groups could appoint someone as a public point of contact.

I appreciate that in Silicon Valley, community groups are not the most exciting topic of conversation, and Facebook Groups itself is not seen as a disruptive, ground-breaking or interesting app. Even within Facebook, people tell me Groups is “low profile” and “low status”.

“Zuckerberg is very focused”, one former employee said to me. “When the battle was for the future of mobile, he made everyone do that. Now the battle is for messaging and live video — it’s Facebook versus WeChat and Snapchat. When I was there, we only kept Groups alive for internal stuff. It might be merged with Messenger. It’s just not where the future is”.

If Groups did get merged with Messenger, it would be a pity. It would be another small step towards a more individualistic and less communal world.

But I noticed one of your teams recently built office collaboration tools to link Facebook Groups to the ‘Facebook at Work’, and another team rolled out a ‘Sell’ tool for groups that trade second-hand goods. So I thought I would write in the hope that there was space for a community organising pathway as well. You spoke in your F8 speech about Facebook “giving people a voice”. Groups could be the part that gives them a voice collectively.